So for months, the two of them would spend their days talking about Buddhism while doing some truly miserable physical labor.

Let's say, like, you have shovels, and your job is to basically scrape down a trail in a park somewhere in the Cascades in Washington State, and to make sure that the drainage ditches are clear, right? Like, that would be the type of thing that we would do.

Or, like, we would basically say, "Okay, there's all these blackberry brambles," and, um, blackberry is an invasive species, right? Which it is, in Washington, it's a huge problem.

So we have to clear all the blackberry out, and here is, like, your protective armor, because it's all thorns, obviously, and here's a weed whacker, and you guys spend the next four hours clearing out [laughs] all this blackberry.

Which, by the way, is a sh- that's a fucking horrible job.

[laughs] But it was, but it wasn't that bad, right? Um, and he would basically say that you should not think so much about what you're doing.

Don't think about being unhappy.

He was reading Buddhist texts, Hindu scriptures, even American beat poets inspired by Eastern philosophy.

Like, will college continue to be worth it? And if so, will the public kind of get that value out of it?

Well, if it's still just the main way in which we sort different classes into different groups and say, this is the upper middle class, and this is how they retain their signal by going to these schools, and this is how the people in those networks will hire them into certain jobs, then sure, right? That's a very cynical, but I think mostly realistic way to think about the function of college, or at least the top 10% of colleges or so.

I think that otherwise, I do think that it will be under a little bit of assault, but I don't think it'll be fully killed off by what's happening.

I think there will be massive changes.

So, for example, I live in Bay Area, like I said, and there's been a massive expansion of the computer science department at UC Berkeley over the past 20 years, and that coincides with all the cultural and political economic directives learn to code or whatever.

And these kids who are very hardworking, mostly middle class, some rich kids and then some working class kids who go to UC Berkeley, they all heard that and said, I don't want to be economically predisposed when I'm 24 years old, 26 year old, 30 years old.

And so I will do what everyone's telling me and I'll go into computer science.

in your opinion, is a bellwether maybe they've missed or they've just sort of underreacted to? What would be on your list?

Um, like, did you come away thinking that teaching can successfully adapt or, or no?

Oh, man.

I mean, that's a tough question.

[chuckles] The level of despair that I found amongst the professors was quite profound.

And you know, one of the professors wrote me.

He's a drama teacher at Grambling State University, which a HBCU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And you know, like, he was talking about how it was so hard to get the kids, his students, to read August Wilson's "Fences," and he gave them all these options, right? You can watch the movie that came out.

Any of them more positive and less cynical about higher ed?

Um, like, did you come away thinking that teaching can successfully adapt or, or no?

Oh, man.

I mean, that's a tough question.

[laughs] The level of despair that I found amongst the professors was quite profound.

And you know, one of the professors wrote me.

He's a drama teacher at Grambling State University, which a HBCU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And you know, like, he was talking about how it was so hard to get the kids, his students, to read August Wilson's Fences, and he gave them all these options, right? You can watch the movie that came out.

Any of them more positive and less cynical about higher ed?

Talk about what has made the university system vulnerable to an AI takeover, Jay.

Well, you know, the biggest thing is this thing called the enrollment cliff.

And what happened was that starting in 2008 with the financial crash, there was a big drop in the number of births in America, and that has not recovered.

And so we are now 18 years out from 2008.

And so this year has been really tough.

eyeballed by a lot of higher ed administrators, thinkers, like economists is saying, well, what happens when the number of 18 year olds who are graduating from college goes down? Like what is going to happen to all these universities? We've had 50 years of unstoppable growth in the number of people going to college.

And then suddenly we're going to have a decline in the supply of high school graduates that are coming in.

be like a prestige thing?

Yeah

... once KD went to the Warriors, right? Um, but I had the same arc with LeBron.

I didn't like the Decision, but I didn't understand why everyone was so mad.

But then I really liked that Spurs team.

But then when he lost to, uh, when he lost to the, to the Mavericks, and then that whole summer he was putting out ads being like, "You know, I just like my family," and, "I'm a kid from Ma--" Then I, uh, uh, or, like, I, I think I started to like him a little bit more 'cause I actually for the first time felt sorry for him, because it seemed like he was being vulnerable in a way.

And then you want him to be the redemption story, right? Uh, b- and also because he was playing so-- That, that's another thing.

Sometimes the guys who are villains are so awesome that you can't deny them.

Yeah.

And that whole... thing is gone and even though bill self still at kansas it feels like the dynamic has flipped completely that the like high impact freshmen who are getting paid between five and twelve million dollars whatever their nil evaluation is are now controlling everything and you have this ultra talented special 18 year old kid deciding how much he's played and again i'm editorializing here he might have real injuries here but this is what it feels like from the outside

Yeah, I mean, I'm like a fan of the Sacramento Kings, and we might get the first pick, and I wouldn't want to draft him, if I was being honest, right? Because I just think that...

Really? Yeah, because I wouldn't want to draft Boozer either because I hate Duke, but also I just think he's too below the rim and...

Heavy legs.

Yeah, I think I would take the bouncer.

But with Peterson, it's just like, why are you not trying right now? What more do you need? You have a probably top three home crowd in the country, right? You went to Kansas probably for that reason.

I mean, some of it would be money, but you would have gotten paid anywhere, right? You have...

Yeah, I

Mm.

And I don't think that teachers should be doing that.

I don't think that that's healthy for them.

I don't think it's healthy for the classroom.

I don't think if parents saw that type of behavior, and they saw the teacher just h- always just scrambling around, taking phones away from kids, that they would think that that was good either.

Um, and so from that, that's, that, that informs my perspective a lot on this, right? Like, what is a good classroom? And I think it's just very hard to make the argument that having phones is good in the classroom, and so I don't know.

I, I, I guess I just think that if that's the end of it, that almost every school district in America doesn't have- has a no cell phone policy, I think that would be a very good start.

Yeah

But first, I'm curious about your reaction to this news, what you think of this demonstration that happened at this church and how it kinda overlaps with what you've been writing and thinking about lately.

It's far more in the vein of 2020, right, where you had a lot of disruptions.

Like, you know, I remember Black Brunch was one that got a lot of attention, where people would walk into, like, a brunch place that served mimosas or something, that was stereotypically, like, white suburban, and would start yelling about police violence and white supremacy.

Um, that type of disruption, uh, tactic is much more from the 2020 era, and I don't think it's particularly effective anymore, and I think that it probably...

Like, I don't think that any of these people should be brought up on federal charges, right, for storming into a church.

And yet, at the same time, I guess just, you know, if you want my opinion on it, I just think it's very counterproductive to go to provide that image of you disrupting a church service.

And I guess, overall, I've been thinking a lot about the way in which progressive movement or left movements or even Democrat, sort of center-left movements interact with the church in general.

Do you think that both are true, or is it more about, like, you know, convincing the other side, which can, you know, be done most easily by being a religious person?

You shouldn't be doing anything to try to stop ICE, and if you do, then hopefully you don't get killed, but if you do, then, you know, you shouldn't have been there.

Yeah, yeah.

That seems to be what they're converging on, I think, in part because I think that, I think maybe they have some realization that when people watch that, even other law enforcement officials that, you know, I've heard from, um, I haven't seen much defense of this, and these are not, like, left-leaning liberal people, um, or even people that I know who are in the military who know different forms of engagement.

It seems like the officer who, uh, did this was also in the military.

You know, there's just sort of a sense of horror about it and, like, senselessness about it.

And so I think that that's why it's been cast as, like, well, there is a left-wing network out there, and, you know, like, uh, they're all radicalized, and she was tau- They, they make it seem like it was, uh, you know, Al-Qaeda or something like that, where there's, like, a manual [laughs] that they pass around.

And they're like, "Okay, here's what you do," and like, uh, and that she had been recruited by her wife, right? Like, like, that, that, that's the narrative that they're gonna fixate on, um, and that this is a deep threat to American sovereignty and American safety and everything like that.

[upbeat music] How does AI change news and journalism now that, uh, now that we've got AI just sort of creeping into stories?

How?

You know, like, you, that's just stuff that you do.

Like, you- you need to get an answer, and so ...

And if the person is unwilling to give you an answer, then you follow them around and you ask them the question until they give you an answer.

Like, that's just classic journalism.

So by those standards, sure, it's journalism.

Now, is it ...

Fair.

Where's your thinking today?

You know, it's interesting.

I...

People have accused me of being, like, a AI simp in some sorts of ways, but I...

That's not true, I don't think The relevant piece of information here is that when I was in graduate school in 2003, 2004, so over 20 years ago, there were large language models that were out there, but they were very rudimentary, and they only fed off, like, a corpus of a very small amount of text.

And that was just because of computing power.

It's not that the technology has changed, it's just that the amount of stuff that you can feed these models has changed.

How worried should we be about the rise of the AI journalist freelancer?

I don't think about you at all.

But what I see is the reorganization of Canadian sort of civic and national values around a let's do it ourselves type of thing, right? Like, that seems to be what's happening, and we don't need them, right? And for it to be a Cold War, I think there would have to be more animosity, not just within the American trade policy, where there is quite a bit of animosity, but amongst the public as well, and that there would have to be almost political animosity bordered on military force, which is not anywhere close to where we are, right? And so the way that I would think about it is that on the Canadian side, it very much will feel that way, right, that you have an enemy that unifies the country just, and that you might even make movies like Rocky IV or something like that [laughs] where the American is like [laughs] Ivan Drago or something.

Like, you're like fighting some MAGA dude from like Nebraska or something who's all hopped up on, I don't know, high-fructose corn syrup and steroids, whatever the American products are, right? And that he fights some game kid from like the Toronto suburbs or something.

I, something like that, right? Now, that on your side is actually quite interesting, and it's an interesting opportunity.

It just seems like the question is whether or not there's gonna be such economic disaster from a continuation of this that the reorganization will be impossible, right? So things like let's have AI sovereignty.

Well, it's kinda hard when like the AI companies are mostly in the United States and China.

Cloud sovereignty, it's like, can you really get off AWS, right, or Microsoft or whatever? Is that possible? Right? Now, I saw that tourism in the United States has basically like fallen off a cliff, that people don't wanna go to the US for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that they might be swept up [laughs] by ICE or detained in the airport or something like that, and that money is being redistributed into other places that actually seem like it would lead to a healthier national character.

Maybe this isn't a cold war between Canada and the US, but it is in the context of this greater reordering around the, quote-unquote, "second Cold War".